I wasn’t going to post about this, but here I am posting about it. I wish I understood my mind. Sometimes it’s like I have a hedgehog inside my skull with whom I am not friends. So this weekend The Sims 3 and every single expansion to date appeared on Steam, and not only that, Steam are currently hosting a 50% off sale on the Ultimate edition (containing The Sims 3 plus the World Adventures, Ambitions, Late Night, High-End Loft Stuff and Fast Lane Stuff expansions). Yes! So instead of paying £115 you merely pay £57.50. Hm. I think I’ll be keeping my money, but I’ve deposited some thoughts on this plus the launch trailer for Late Night after the jump.
This is a more interesting development than you might think. The reason The Sims wasn’t on Steam prior to this was because of Electronic Arts’ faithful supporting of their own store. After all, The Sims 3 was always going to sell like Hell’s hotcakes. Why let Valve take a chunk of the profit?

The fact that EA have now gone ahead and allowed The Sims 3 to appear on Steam could probably be seen as a sign of not exactly surrender, but certainly acceptance of the importance of Valve’s delivery system. Can we take this to meann that EA will be releasing The Sims Medieval concurrently on both Steam and their own store? That’d certainly be a coup for Valve.

My wife has loved the Sims for a long time, and I was skeptical after my disappointment with the first game. However, since Sims 2 I’ve loved this series. LOVED it.

I’m a hardcore gamer by all means. I raid in WoW, I revere Half Life, I love Civilization, I’ve got government-issued dual citizenship in Oblivion’s Tamriel.. and I will go on the record to say that Sims 3 is every bit as fantastic as all of these games.

If you’ve ever wondered about this series a 50%-off sale is the time to check it out. Playing a game where you set your own win conditions is endlessly liberating. Inventing alternative realities for your look-alike is uproariously entertaining.

Don’t hate this one for being the elephant in the room. Of all the games made famous by riding on their laurels, Sims is not one of them. This is a fantastic, detailed, charming game. $90 is a fair price for such a mountain of content.

I will say that I think Sims 2 is better than Sims 3. Sims 3 just goes a bit… OCD at times such as having to pick individual ingredients when you go shopping or remembering to put books away one at a time. Those confusing buffs and status affects can fuck off as well.
The games main innovation was of being in single zone so sims can walk down the road to each others houses, shops etc without having to go through a loading screen. It’s a nice idea that never really worked just because the size of the town is so small that you’ll never have more than a dozen families so it could be an in-game week before you see your non randomised neighbors.

The mountain of content is half the problem. A fully expansioned-up copy of Sims or Sims 2 is a bewildering, shapeless mass of systems and events and weirdness popping up at you without cessation or relent. It’s simply too much. Sims 3 probably hasn’t gotten there yet with only two proper expansions, admittedly, but it will no doubt happen.

And ultimately, I just don’t have the level of interest required to pay the steep and rarely lowered prices EA is asking, especially when the discount is only on the complete bundle, including two “expansions” full of decoration crap that I would only care about if I had an suppressed interior designer inside me waiting to get out. I recognize that the Sims is a franchise that’s got some genuinely interesting things to offer to gaming, and I enjoy LPs of the game because of some of the wackiness that goes on, but there’s ultimately too much day to day micromanagement for me to stick with it, nor do I sufficiently enjoy the “animated dollhouse” angle to spend much time getting their furnishings just perfect.

Very much agreed on the systems overload of multiple expansion packs. I bought just about all of the expansions for TS1 and it was a very strange experience to play. Generally I’d end up going to nightclubs where all the patrons would spend their night standing in the toilets ooohing and aaahing over a performing dog.

“Especially since a lot of the content in the ‘expansions’ just fills in stuff that should have been in the game to begin with.”

I’d say the base game had more than enough content to it at launch, especially given the high levels of user customisation available. The expansions like Night Life & World adventures add in quite a lot of new game play elements, that tbh even if they had been available at initial launch (which I’m sceptical of, despite your claims) would of probably caused a lot of confusion to players attempting to get to grips with the base game. You need to learn to walk before you can run.

As for the bundle price, complete bargain Vs what you’d pay for all that at retail, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I already own them all on DVD I’d be all over it. The necessity to drop a products price is not based upon time as people seem to think, but in relation to staying competitive Vs the newer competition. Until some other developer starts making a rival people simulator franchise there’s little incentive for EA to drop their prices on Sims 3 products. With CoD Activision don’t lower their prices until a new game is out (and even then it’s a miserly amount), and likewise MS with Halo.

They forgot to mention on the box of the original Sims 3 that they ripped out so much stuff you HAVE to buy upgrades.

The game is full of menus with…one item. A peculiar choice at best in a game about being a consuming airhead. Especially considering the Sims 4 shelf in my local game store has more Sims titles than the virtual television shelf in the bloody game.

What’s wrong with the EA Store? I guess the website could be better, but I’ve never had a problem with the downloader or the process of installing/activating stuff. I’ve actually used the downloader to install games that I have disk copies of so that I wouldn’t have to deal with their medieval CD protection.

– buying games and not having that game added to my account for several days.

– trying to call up to see whats going on and getting put through to someone in Canada and having to wait for half an hour for them to work out that I’d payed and not got my game (though the lady was nice I think they have poor structure and management).

My wife and I tried buying the Barnacle Bay vacation content but we just weren’t able to download it. EA was relatively cool about it. At first they just offered to refund our Sims Points, but when we told them there was nothing else on the store we were interested in they refunded our money.

My issue with the EA store Sims 3 is that it doesn’t want to update when you transfer it to a new machine, no matter how much I’ve tried playing with the registry. And I don’t really feel like spending hours downloading and reinstalling the Sims whenever I want to play it. That’s probably my favoritest favorite thing about Steam; it doesn’t even bat an eyelash when you copy it wholesale to a new OS install, it just keeps on truckin’ and lets you get on playin’.

The Movies was a pretty decent Simalike, still worth playing even now. I think it owed it’s strength to the fact that it wasn’t just the Sims with a different coat of paint, there were genuine attempts to make the game mechanics thematically relevant. Shame the franchise died when Lionhead basically abandoned PC.

I actually bought the original Sims 3 release a little after it came out and enjoyed it, although it was funny (in a bad way) just how obviously butchered the shipped content was for DLC purposes (indeed, lots of menus with 1 item.)

Fun game anyway. So I caved and bought it on Steam just now so that I can play it again, since that disk is long gone like every other game disc I’ve ever bought. I tell ya, if it’s not on a download service now I’ll never play it again.

Kind of pricey, but meh. It’s not like it’s going to get cheaper anytime soon – it’s the Sims.

Yes some menus had one choice but there are three points I’d make in response
i) You are able to repaint everything in the game so one sofa could have hundreds of styles
ii) There wasn’t the same emphasis on stages of quality, it didn’t matter what fridge you put food in what matters is what food you put in the fridge, so there was no cheapest>cheap>decent>luxury, A fridge is a fridge and bath tub is a bath tub.
iii) The Sims exchange had plenty of home grown variations and mods to use including a number of freebies from Maxis themselves.

There wasn’t the same emphasis on stages of quality, it didn’t matter what fridge you put food in what matters is what food you put in the fridge, so there was no cheapest>cheap>decent>luxury, A fridge is a fridge and bath tub is a bath tub

That’s one of the thing’s I really didn’t like about the Sims 3, despite enjoying it more than any other Sims game yet (some, but not a huge amount, if you’re interested). The stages of quality gave a bit of (optional) structure to the game – the consumerist grind. You always wanted to get the better device to make your sim-life that little bit easier, to free up your time to do fun stuff. Making the differences mostly cosmetic took something out of the game for me.

Oh, and I’m assuming the reason that it’s suddenly appeared on Steam is a simple “we’ve wrung most of the sales we can out of this old cash cow by ourselves, let’s get it on Steam and flog it some more” strategy.

Well, the bundle helped bring my attention to the game being on Steam, which was good, but I only bought the game itself – I’m in it for the Alice & Kev shenanigans rather than the dressing up and job hunting.

Anyway, all was well and good and Steamy until I launched the game itself and hit EA’s little launcher, which insisted on using IE to handle its web-related functions. Sadly I currently have the IE9 beta on there, which led to a steady stream of script errors and wonky links. I don’t blame EA for issues with someone else’s beta software (though I suspect their scripting might well be the issue), but I do blame them for ignoring the OS preferred browser setting and seemingly not giving me the option of specifying what should happen when I follow a link.

I felt better when I realised that I had little interest in what the launcher had to offer, and once I was in the game itself there were no problems. But by then I was in a bad enough mood to give my new Sims a few significant problems of their own.

I recently saw a post at MoreAwesomeThanYou forum (awesome mod is critical for me enjoying the game) that the game version is different on Steam and this may be a temporary or long term issue with mods.